Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I wish to hell he'd go away.

Apologies to William Hughes Mearns (not, as several helpful readers have pointed out, Ogden Nash), but that's how my mother
recited it.

Regarding my curious physical ailment, the jury is still out,
tests so far proving inconclusive. Multiple Whatsis (nudge nudge, wink wink, don't tell Google) remains a leading possibility, but is
notoriously hard to diagnose. I still have numbness and weakness in my left leg and arm (and sporadically on my right side), my foot still flops ("Here comes Gimpy!"), and amusing cognitive glitches persist (difficulty spelling words, reversing right & left, etc.). At this point I'm just sick of it. Thanks to all the folks who have written in with advice.

On a brighter note, June will see the release of the new version of Ubuntu linux, which I have been using since I completely dumped Windows a few months ago. If you are sick (and you should be) of the endless security holes and malware panics that constitute the "Windows Experience" today, give it a try. You can download the Live CD from the Ubuntu site and run it on your pc -- without installing anything -- to get a taste of what linux is like.

I've restored the fundraising screen you see when you click on
"Current Columns" on our front page, and, as always, we appreciate
contributions (in the form of subscriptions).
I sat down the other day to calculate the cost of actually
feeding all these cats and almost didn't bother getting up again.

Lastly, we are trying an experiment this month. Rather than posting one long page of twelve columns as I usually do, I have broken this issue into three pages of four columns each, navigable by the arrows at the foot of each page. This will free more space for ads without, I hope, making them too obnoxious. More importantly, it will create some variation in the ads Google serves up. With one long page, whatever Google decides the page is "about," based on the first few paragraphs, becomes the theme for all the ads, and seeing an entire page full of ads devoted to my current travails and infirmities was becoming very depressing (which is why I wrote "whatsis" above). So we shall see....

Dear Word Detective: Recently I was in a play ("On The
Verge (or The
Geography of Yearning)" by Eric Overmyer) in which my character uttered
the phrase "fan mail from some flounder." At first I thought the phrase
was just a bit of nonsense (as there is quite a bit of silly linguistic
nonsense in this play). But then I did a search for it on the internet
and found this phrase is still in use all over the place! What is the
origin of this bizarre phrase? And what on earth does it mean? --
Mary.

Well, believe it or not, your problem is that you
evidently don't watch
enough TV. Or maybe you do watch tons of TV, in which case you are
simply watching the wrong things on TV. Many people turn to TV news
shows to try to understand the world, for instance. This is a terrible
mistake. You're much better off watching cartoons. You'll learn more
about life on this planet from one hour of The Simpsons than from six
months of the festival of fear mongering and pharmaceutical ads that
passes for national news shows in this country.

If you happened to be watching TV between 1959 and 1964,
the best use of
your boob-tube hours would have been to catch "Rocky and His Friends,"
a
pioneering cartoon series created by Jay Ward, originally shown on ABC
but moved to NBC (as "The Bullwinkle Show") in 1961. The stars of the
show were Rocket J. Squirrel (aka "Rocky"), a flying squirrel, and
Bullwinkle J. Moose, a moose, both residents of Frostbite Falls,
Minnesota. Summarizing the range of inspired dementia offered by this
show is beyond the capacity of one short column, but Rocky, Bullwinkle
and the gang coined a fair number of catch phrases still in use today,
including "Curses, foiled again!", the frustrated cry of evildoer
Snidely Whiplash upon seeing yet another of his nefarious plots foiled
by Dudley Do-Right's clever horse, Horse.

"Fan mail from some flounder" comes from a brief segment
routinely used
to introduce commercial breaks on the show. As I recall, Rocky and
Bullwinkle are standing on a beach when Rocky looks down and exclaims,
"Look Bullwinkle! A message in a bottle!", to which the moose replies,
"Fan mail from some flounder?" (I have posted a sound file of this bit
of dialogue here). In this watery
context, "Fan mail from some flounder" thus actually makes a certain
amount of sense.

Life in the petting zoo.

Dear Word Detective: I am a computer programmer. Not too
long ago, I
was assigned the task of changing some code someone else had written.
As I was browsing through the code looking for comments and getting a
general feel for what the thing does, I ran across a word that stumped
me: "goatrope." It clearly was derogatory in its meaning, as gleaned
from the context ("...to stem the goatrope use of global
variables..."). Any clues? The one meaning I found online related to
slang used by the US Marines, but that still doesn't really explain it
or its origins. -- Gary.

Ah, yes, comments in the code. Most computer users don't
know this, but
programmers frequently put little notes in a program explaining what
certain parts of it do. For instance, I'm fairly certain that somewhere
in my word processing program there's a comment reading "If user is
typing rapidly, indicating a productive train of thought, this segment
will cause cat to leap onto keyboard, deleting entire document."

"Goat-rope" (usually either hyphenated or written as two
words) seems to
have appeared as military slang in the 1970s for "a complete mess,
waste
of time or very confused situation" (along the lines of "SNAFU"), and
has several more vivid (and unprintable) variations. A probable
ancestor, "goat-roper," which had appeared at least by the 1960s and
probably much earlier, was used as civilian slang to mean "a country
bumpkin" or, among country folk, "an incompetent posing as a farmer or
rancher" (the sort known as "all hat and no cattle").

There are several theories about "goat rope" in the
"screwed-up
situation" sense. One is that it is simply a sanitized form of "goat
rape" as a metaphor for a pointless and unproductive activity. Other
theories point to children's rodeo events, which sometimes involve the
kiddies roping goats (rather than more dangerous steers). Thus to call
an adult a "goat-roper" would be to impugn the person's seriousness and
competence, and a "goat-rope" would be an empty exercise.

Hit pause,
dammit. The cat's on fire again.

Dear Word Detective: I was recently watching Jeopardy!,
and while I
was grabbing a snack from the kitchen they went through a couple of
questions that I didn't get a chance to hear properly, or so I've come
to believe because the answers didn't seem very probable. Maybe you can
clear it up for me. I believe I heard them say that the word "glamour"
is derived from "grammar" though I can't say that I can see the
connection. I just checked an online dictionary, and it verifies it,
saying the etymology is based on the association of learning with
magic,
as "a magic spell or enchantment" is an alternate definition of
"glamour." -- Murtaza.

Excellent. I've been waiting for someone to ask this
question. It's
long past time for grammarians to be recognized as the truly glamorous
stars they are. Incidentally, it sounds like you could use a "personal
video recorder" along the lines of TiVo. Here at Word Detective World
Headquarters, we use ours to play a little game I call "forensic
TiVo-ing," wherein one person drives the other nuts by repeatedly
replaying snatches of TV in an attempt (usually futile) to decode
unintelligible dialog or unfunny jokes.

By the way, the word at hand is often spelled "glamor"
in the US, but
"glamour" is actually the more common spelling here, although many
other
words ending in "our" in the UK ("labour," "honour," etc.) end in "or"
in the US. However, "glamorous" drops the "u" on both sides of the
pond.

"Glamour" and "grammar" are essentially the same word.
In classical
Greek and Latin, "grammar" (from the Greek "grammatikos," meaning "of
letters") covered the whole of arts and letters, i.e., higher knowledge
in general. In the Middle Ages, "grammar" was generally used to mean
"learning," which at that time included, at least in the popular
imagination, a knowledge of magic. The narrowing of "grammar" to mean
the rules of language was a much later development, first focusing on
Latin and only in the 17th century extended to the study of English and
other languages.

Meanwhile, "grammar" had percolated into Scottish
English (as "gramarye"), where an "l" was substituted for an "r" and
the
word eventually became "glamour," used to mean specifically knowledge
of
magic and spells. "Glamour" was then introduced to English (by, among
others, Sir Walter Scott), and took on the meaning of "enchantment,"
and
later "alluring charm" and our current "exotic and fashionable
attractiveness."

And what do we have for our guests, Johnny?

Dear Word Detective: What is the connection if any
between a "host" who
entertains people in his home and a "host" of invading troops? -- David
Russell.

Good question. Incidentally, "host" is also a verb
meaning "to act as a
host" (in the sense of "lodge or entertain"), often used today to mean
"act as master of ceremonies for" ("Paris Hilton will host the Oscars
this year"). Usage "purists" love to object to this use of "host,"
apparently imagining it a recent invention, but "host" in this sense
was
good enough for Shakespeare and has been common ever since.

The two senses of "host" you mention are considered
separate words in
English, but actually share a common root.

The first of the two "hosts" to appear in English, the
one meaning "a
multitude, a great number," is first recorded in the late 13th century
in its original meaning of "an army; a large force of armed men." The
ultimate root of this "host" is the Latin "hostis," meaning "stranger
or
enemy" (also the root of our modern "hostile"). The transition from
"army" to simply meaning "a large number" came in the early 17th
century, usually in the sense of a large number of persons or other
entities (as in "the hosts of heaven," meaning angels). But today
"host" is employed simply as a fancy way to say "a lot" ("Ms. Hilton's
public image presents the Academy with a host of problems").

The other sort of "host," meaning "a person who offers
lodging to
guests," appeared in the early 14th century, and has developed a range
of meanings since, from an animal that "hosts" parasites or disease to
a
computer which "hosts" files for a number of users. This "host" comes
from the Latin "hospes," meaning, depending on context, "host," "guest"
or "stranger." ("Hospes" is also the root of "hospitality," "hospital"
and, via French, "hotel.") Interestingly, this "hospes" harks back to
the same Latin "hostis" (stranger or enemy) at the root of "host"
meaning "multitude." Thus "host" in this "innkeeper" sense would have
originally meant "one who shelters strangers."

There is actually another "host" in English, meaning the
consecrated
bread or wafer used in Christian Communion. This "host" derives from
the Latin "hostia," meaning "victim or sacrifice," applied in this
instance to Christ. In its more general Latin meaning of "victim," this
"hostia" was probably also related to "hostis" (enemy). So all three
"hosts" are really branches of one tree.